Alistair Darling: As I said to the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) a few moments ago, the fiscal rules that we set up 10 years ago have served this country well and enabled us to protect public investment, which Conservative Governments were unable to do in their 18 years in government. Those rules are important and it is also important to ensure that we maintain public investment and long-term sustainable finances.

Alistair Darling: The Government are committed to reduce carbon emissions by 60 per cent. by 2050 through both domestic and international action.

Ben Chapman: While I accept that value for money for patients is a primary determinant, does my hon. Friend think that the controls on PCTs, both democratic and governmental, are sufficient to ensure that value for money is always obtained and that when, for example, GPs enter into joint ventures with the private sector for primary care premises, we can ensure that best value for health is obtained?

George Osborne: May I ask the Chancellor about the latest confusion at his Treasury—the future of the Barnett formula? Wendy Alexander says that the formula should be reviewed, and Lord Barnett says the same. The Prime Minister is dithering and, for once in his life, does not want a review. The Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor says that
	"the Government would need to engage on this issue...and to deal with concerns in English constituencies about the fairness of the current system."
	Does the Chancellor agree with the Lord Chancellor?

Harriet Harman: The business for the week commencing9j 10 March will be:
	Monday 10 March—Estimates [2nd Allotted Day]. There will be a debate on Northern Rock and banking reform, followed by a debate on London Underground and the public-private partnership agreements.
	At 10pm the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.
	Tuesday 11 March—Proceedings on the Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill, followed by remaining stages of the European Union (Amendment) Bill.
	Wednesday 12 March—My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will open his Budget statement.
	Thursday 13 March—Continuation of the Budget debate.
	Friday 14 March—Private Members' Bills.
	The provisional business for the week commencing 17 March will include:
	Monday 17 March—Continuation of the Budget debate.
	Tuesday 18 March—Conclusion of the Budget debate.
	Wednesday 19 March—Opposition day [7th allotted day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion, subject to be announced.
	Thursday 20 March—Topical debate: subject to be announced, followed by motions to approve changes to Standing Orders and other House business.
	 [Monday 10 March: Treasury Committee, "The run on the Rock"—Fifth Report of Session 207-08, HC56-I.
	 Transport Committee, "The London Underground and the Public-Private Partnership Agreements"—Second Report of Session 2007-08, HC45.]

Harriet Harman: The right hon. Lady asked about the Home Secretary's announcement on ID cards. The policy on them has not changed; the Home Secretary has announced the rolling out of the policy on ID cards. It makes sense for passports to have biometric data and for visas for foreign nationals to include such data. It also makes sense to extend ID cards next year to people working in secure areas of airports, as the Home Secretary has announced today. If there were a question of extending them on a compulsory basis, the House knows that that would be a matter for its consideration. The Home Secretary made it absolutely clear that there would be a roll-out on a voluntary basis, and that is what she is putting in place.  [Interruption.] It is not a change of policy, so it does not require a statement in the House.
	The right hon. Lady asked about the post office closure programme, and there will be a debate on that matter in due course. She also asked for a debate about the qualities of political leadership; I suggest that she makes that a topic for an Opposition day debate.
	We made child poverty a priority when the question of poverty was not on the agenda of the previous Conservative Government. Having a strong economy and high employment so that children are not brought up in workless households, as well as increasing financial support for low-income families, is the best way to tackle child poverty. We will press on with our commitment to tackling child poverty and we are glad that at last the Conservative party has joined us in that commitment.
	The right hon. Lady talked about the question of footpaths, and I will refer that to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. There are not cuts in maternity services or accident and emergency; there has been record investment in our health services, including maternity services and accident and emergency.
	The right hon. Lady mentioned the Mayor of London. During the past eight years, when Ken Livingstone has been Mayor, London has been transformed for the better. At the elections in May, there will be a clear choice for Londoners.  [Interruption.] Yes, there will. It will be the man from Oxfordshire offering cuts in the police and in transport and risking London's economy versus Ken Livingstone, who will put more police in all London neighbourhoods and who has massively increased public transport. When it comes to allegations of criminal offences, the police investigate, not the House, and the courts judge, not the House. That is not the business of the House—nor should it be.

Simon Hughes: Before we have the Budget statement next week, may we have a statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer or a debate to make sure that the Treasury has understood the concerns about the collapse in the bingo industry and the need for changes in tax regime to ensure that clubs in all our constituencies, which have hundreds of thousands of members, have a chance of survival?
	On Monday night in the debate on the estimates, we have a debate on the failed private finance initiative scheme for Metronet. Will it be possible to debate then or soon afterwards the other apparent PFI scandal? Not only do we appear to have non-domiciled Members of the House of Lords, but it seems that because of the PFI scheme that the now Prime Minister brought in, the Home Office, the Treasury and other buildings have been built under PFI and the owners have moved to tax havens such as the Channel Islands and are not paying taxes. That is clearly scandalous and entirely inconsistent with other Government policy.
	As we come to the end of the financial year, we gather that during the financial year the health service has made a profit of a sum approaching £2 billion. If that is the case, may we have a debate to explain how, at the same time as the health service is making a profit, many trusts are unable to fulfil waiting list targets and probably every local authority in England, including the one that the Leader of the House and I represent, must make cuts in social services for the vulnerable? The Department appears to be making a profit and at the same time pulling money in from local government, which is caring for people.
	Can the right hon. and learned Lady explain the reports that there will be a cut in the budget for science and research, potentially leading to the closure of our seven radiotelescopes, including the world-renowned Jodrell Bank telescope, which cost only £2.5 million to sustain—the same as the expenses of the members of the Cabinet?
	I have asked the Leader of the House three times, as Commonwealth day approaches, whether we may have a debate on the Commonwealth. I hope she will be able to give me a positive reply, given that Commonwealth day is next Monday.
	I also ask, as last week, whether we could have a debate on Home Office matters, the citizenship Green Paper, and the immigration rules, which have come into force even though there is much opposition to them, and whether, as is illustrated by the case reported on the front page of one of our national papers today about a constituent of mine, the Home Office is still insisting that gay people should be sent back to countries such as Iran.

Angus MacNeil: World war two lasted more than five and a half years. This month marks five years since the Iraq war started. The Nobel prize-winner Joe Stiglitz reckons that it has cost $6 trillion. The Library says that it has cost the UK about £2.5 million a day. May we have a debate with a view to setting up a Committee of inquiry into this war, which may have cost half a million lives?

Richard Younger-Ross: Will the Leader of the House explain or make a statement on the disrespect shown to the House in the way in which Departments answer named day questions? The office of the Leader of the House has an exemplary record in that every question in the past five years has been answered in five days. However, may we have an explanation of why the Treasury's replies on time have fallen from 79 per cent. to 51 per cent. and those of the Department for Communities and Local Government have fallen from 87 per cent. to 49 per cent., and why the Department for Children, Schools and Families does not even keep records, claiming that such information could be provided only at disproportionate cost?

Paul Flynn: When may we debate the need to prosecute GlaxoSmithKline for suppressing the truth about drug trials, which show that the drug Seroxat is not only useless but produces lethal side effects that have killed many people? The matter was last debated in the House in 2004.
	The regulatory authority has failed to control GlaxoSmithKline. Such a debate would be an opportunity to congratulate "Panorama", Charles Medawar of Social Audit, the Seroxat Users Group, the charity Mind and certain hon. Members on a campaign, which has sadly been ignored for five years.

Bob Neill: May we have a debate on the operation of the Greater London Authority Acts? If an employee of any other local authority in this country failed to declare that they were a director of a company that had applied to that authority for a grant, there would be a formal report to the authority's monitoring officer and disciplinary action. In the case of Mr. Jasper, a political appointee under section 67 of the 1999 Act, we now know that although the Mayor was notified of his failure to declare, no formal report was made to the monitoring officer and no disciplinary action followed. Does the Leader of the House accept that it is necessary to explain why proper probity does not appear to reign at city hall, as opposed to in other local authorities?

Andrew Rosindell: Will the right hon. and learned Lady accept that we need an urgent debate in the House on matters relating to London, particularly the antics of the Mayor, Mr. Livingstone, in the light of his adviser and his declared intention, apparently, to reappoint that adviser, despite the scandal and the police investigation? Is it not time that the House debated that issue?

Harriet Harman: Everyone will sympathise with the hon. Gentleman's point. I will ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport to look into that individual case and to seek a solution for it. As to whether further action needs to be taken, we want to be absolutely sure that disabled people do not suffer discrimination, whether on transport or in any other services, and whether or not it affects their opportunity to work. I hope that he will join us in supporting the further measures to tackle inequality and discrimination contained in the Equality Bill that we will introduce later this year.

Harriet Harman: Labour women MPs range from those with great experience, like my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), who is the Chair of the Select Committee on Transport as well as being a mother and grandmother, to the fresh-faced new arrivals who entered in 1997, 2001 and 2005.

Harriet Harman: I think that we have made a great deal of progress and while we should be gratified about it, we should not be grateful for it. We are not doing women a favour, but delivering long overdue rights. Although we have made great strides, we have much further to go.
	We have introduced a national minimum wage, which has just about ended the pay gap between the lowest paid men and women, but that is not enough. We need to close the gender pay gap altogether and our new Equality Bill, which we will bring forward later this year, will help us step up progress towards that.
	We now have nurseries and after-school clubs in all areas. In my constituency in the London borough of Southwark, there is double the number of child care places that there were six years ago, but it is still a problem for many women to find good child care that they can trust and afford, so we will continue to improve its accessibility, affordability and quality.

Harriet Harman: There will be an announcement shortly about the two provisions in the Act which are still to be implemented, and which will be implemented.
	Just as we seek to banish the old crimes against women—

Harriet Harman: My hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, Home Office Ministers and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary for Women and Equality are reviewing the way in which other countries tackle the international sex trade. In this country there are laws to prevent a man from buying a faulty car and to prevent women from working in unsafe workplaces, but apparently it is still OK for men to buy women for sex. Surely, in the 21st century women should not be for sale.

Harriet Harman: That is why we intend, in our new Equality Bill, to extend until 2030 the right of political parties to have women-only shortlists for Parliament.

Harriet Harman: My hon. Friend has made an important point. We are still lagging behind, which is why we intend to include provisions in the Equality Bill to enable us to press on with ensuring that we increase the representation of women in the House of Commons.

Harriet Harman: There are still areas of British life which remain male-dominated. In our top companies 89 per cent. of the FTSE top 100 directors are men, and in our courts 91 per cent. of High Court judges are men.

Harriet Harman: No, I will not give way; I have thought better of it.
	I invite the Tories and all other parties in this House to say that they will back us when we introduce the Equality Bill to extend the right to have all-women shortlists.

Theresa May: I am grateful to the Leader of the House for giving way. She has asked us a direct question about our position on the single Equality Bill that she will introduce later in the year. It is, of course, possible for the use of all-women shortlists to be extended purely by taking away the sunset clause and extending the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002. Is that what the right hon. and learned Lady intends to do in the Bill?

Harriet Harman: Women in this country expect that women will share the decisions both at work and at home. The days of women accepting to be told what to do by men are long gone. As we celebrate 2008 international women's day, we will ensure that we have more women in local government and here in Westminster representing women in this country and fighting for equality here and abroad.
	We are in the era of expectation of equality, but the expectation is not yet matched by reality. Let us—women in Parliament and women in the country—work together to make 2008 a year of further progress towards equality.

Theresa May: I welcome the opportunity to speak on this 97th international women's day. In the past 97 years, the role of women in politics, business and society has progressed beyond recognition. Women did not even have the vote 97 years ago, but now as many women turn out to vote as men, and we now have 126 female representatives sitting in this House. Women were almost non-existent in the business sphere 97 years ago, but today there are about 620,000 majority women-owned businesses in the UK generating about £130 billion in turnover, and at long last businesses have realised that employing a woman is not a hindrance, but an asset to the running of the business—although perhaps they would all like to tell Sir Alan Sugar that. Only a handful of universities admitted women 97 years ago, but there are now more women than men at university in the UK, and that trend is set to continue. Those three examples show that in politics, business and education women have not simply waited for men to give them rights; we have gone out and achieved tremendous progress for ourselves. We must, of course, use international women's day to look ahead to the many complex challenges that women face, but we must also use it to look back and celebrate how far we have come.

Theresa May: My hon. Friend has been a longstanding supporter of the cause of getting more women into Parliament, particularly as Conservative MPs, and of the all-women shortlist. Opinion in the party has been changing on the question of such shortlists. I have always had a concern about them, and I say to members of the Labour party that this may also be a problem for them in only using all-women shortlists as a means of getting women into this House. We need to reach a situation where there is no issue about whether a man or a woman is selected for this House and the attitudes are such that those doing the selecting are examining the individual's skills rather than whether they fit a stereotyped image of a Member of Parliament—

Theresa May: Yes. Indeed, I was happy to join others in congratulating the first female Serjeant at Arms when she first took her position in the Chamber after her appointment.
	The Minister asked me a specific question about the equality Bill and I intervened to ascertain exactly what the Government were going to propose in it. I hope that she realises that we supported the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002. I was the shadow Front-Bench spokesman that dealt with it, taking the Bill through from my side of the House. We were happy to support that Act, and I would be happy to support its extension and the removal of the sunset clause so that the opportunities it provides continue to exist. However, it is wrong to portray the Act purely as one about all-women shortlists. What it does is enable parties to take positive action to ensure that they have women candidates. That positive action can take a variety of forms. It can take the form that we have adopted for selections for Westminster or the form we have adopted for selections of European parliamentary candidates. It can also take the form of all-women shortlists. A variety of methods can be used, and we support the removal of the sunset clause and the extension of the Act.
	It is important to get more women into Parliament. We are not trying to do that to be politically correct, as some people complain, but to be politically effective. Women make good MPs. The business community is developing a strong understanding about the different skills and experiences that women can bring to business and the benefits that they can provide. They include skills of listening, using constructive methods and an approach to collegiality and the delivery of objectives that enable businesses to excel. It is those positives that also mean that we should work to increase the number of women MPs.
	I reject the arguments—sadly, one does still hear them—that if we try to get more women Members, we will get second class Members of Parliament. That is absolutely wrong. We may get Members of Parliament who have a different approach to political issues, but we must all recognise that that different approach is equally as valid as the traditional, more male and macho approach that we have seen in this House. I suggest that the big challenge that remains for women in business and in politics is to be able to succeed as themselves and not to feel that they have to behave like, and adopt the attitudes of, the men in those male-dominated environments. That is why we can genuinely make a change by bringing those new skills into the House, but everybody has to recognise that that approach to being a Member of Parliament is as valid as the more traditional macho approach.

Theresa May: There is a proven demonstrative effect, in that having a woman candidate increases turnout at elections, according to figures from the former Equal Opportunities Commission. At the last election in Maidenhead, the three main political parties were all represented by women.
	Another reason for parties to seek more women candidates is that we should be seeking the most talented candidates, so we should not ignore 50 per cent. of the population and their talents. If decisions are taken by a narrow group of people who think the same way and have the same sort of backgrounds and experiences, they will be less good over time than decisions taken by a wider group of people with greater diversity. Women have different experience sets from those of men, and women know first hand about issues that men do not know about. Indeed, the same goes for many under-represented groups in politics. They all possess valuable experiences that are unique to them and of value to our political life.
	There is perhaps another reason why having women in politics is important. It is that politics has changed. The issues that matter most to people in Britain today are no longer those that are understood as the traditional male issues, although I did receive an intervention on the issue of defence. By and large, when we go out into the streets to talk to people about the issues that matter to them, they do not talk about defence and unemployment, but about health and education. It is vital to be able to draw on the experiences that women have in those areas.
	The approach to politics has also changed. In the new politics, we see a feminisation of politics and a less macho approach. We have seen a move away from the yah-boo tone—although that may not have been demonstrated today. A new politics is emerging, characterised by both issues and method, and it means that we are seeing a different, feminised political agenda.

Theresa May: The hon. Gentleman is right and there are many aspects of the issue that still need to be addressed. Despite the fact that the Government have introduced legislation on this and various other issues that affect women, there are many other issues that need to be addressed. It is still the case that if a woman who is on the receiving end of domestic violence chooses to act, she can become the victim all over again if she has to leave her home and live in the fear that her children will be taken away.
	The hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) intervened earlier on the issue of recourse to public funds for victims of domestic violence. That has been a problem, in relation not only to domestic violence, but to trafficking—

Eleanor Laing: Does the right hon. Lady agree that between 1980 and 1990, the proportion of young people going to university in this country increased massively due to the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Government? That made an enormous difference to many thousands of young women, who had an educational opportunity for the first time.

Ann Clwyd: I remember Winnie Ewing, of course, but my point was that at this moment in time, there are no women SNP Members.
	As my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister for Women and Equality said, our Government introduced the minimum wage, which the Conservatives opposed. When Labour was in opposition I spoke on employment matters, so I know how much opposition there was from big business to the minimum wage. The same arguments were made then as are being made now in relation to legislation on agency workers—that the measure would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. However, in my Cynon Valley constituency, workers are now guaranteed a fair wage and thousands of women have been lifted out of poverty. The minimum wage was an important step forward, and I welcome the recently announced increase to £5.73 an hour. I am also proud to support the Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill, which I hope will ensure fair conditions for thousands of men and women on temporary contracts or working through agencies. It is a scandal that temporary and agency workers work in such poor conditions on such low wages.
	For many years, I have been concerned about women prisoners in the UK. There are still no prisons for women in Wales, so women are imprisoned hundreds of miles from their children, their families and their loved ones. This week, a report from the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health shows that short spells in prison, even on remand, damage women's mental health and family life, yet do little or nothing to stop them reoffending. The damage is made much worse when women are imprisoned a long distance from home and they receive inadequate health care during and after their time in prison. There are more than 4,400 woman in 17 prisons in England. Four women prisoners in every five have mental health problems, most commonly depression and anxiety, and almost half have been the subject of abuse. I welcome the recent report by Jean Corston, a former Member of this House, and very much hope that the Government will take up its recommendations, including the replacement of women's prisons with smaller local custodial units. We should imprison women only when there is no other option. It is of the utmost importance that female prisoners be treated with the dignity and respect that they deserve.

Richard Younger-Ross: Will the right hon. Lady accept that part of the problem is the celebrity culture, which is promoted through fashion and weekend magazines? The stars are seen to be having all these operations and they appear to have size-zero bodies, to which people aspire. Those magazines have a social responsibility not to feature an article on bulimia once every blue moon, but to change the size and the sort of women that they feature.

Ann Clwyd: I agree, as I tighten my jacket. The pressures on women to conform to certain shapes, sizes and looks are extraordinary. The Advertising Standards Authority has a real role to play, but I believe that it is not carrying out the role for which it was set up in respect of regulating adverts of the type that appear in magazines and newspapers. There are pages and pages of such adverts. The things that appear in such media put pressure on young women in particular to get a nose job or some other kind of job done, and that should be regulated by the ASA. As the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) said, there should also be lengthier magazine articles and television items that give a fairer idea of what is going on.
	All the women whom I see in this Chamber are just right—they are not too fat, too thin or too whatever; they are just women. I am pleased to have spoken on international women's day.

Judy Mallaber: I understand that the statue had to be broken because there was no blowtorch. After the incident, there was a worry about further demonstrations, so the order went out to buy a blow torch so that the chains, rather than the valuable statues, could be broken.

Sandra Gidley: Does my hon. Friend accept that it is in the best interests of companies to provide the information? All the evidence from those companies that provide such information is that they get better women applying for jobs as a result. It is win-win situation for women and for the companies.

Julie Kirkbride: There is broad agreement in the House about equalising pay, but I want to mention one of the things that shocked the Select Committee when we looked at the findings of the Women and Work Commission. The commission studied women graduates and compared them with male graduates five years' out of university. One would have thought that there was a reasonable expectation that the pay gap would not even exist there, let alone be very big, but it was still 15 per cent. I worry how intractable the problem of the pay gap is.

Jo Swinson: I welcome the additional information that the hon. Lady provides about her area. I know that she will be concerned about the cuts to those services.
	What is missing, and what the End Violence against Women coalition is calling for, is a cross-departmental approach to the issue. We need to recognise that violence against women is not just about the often excellent Department responsible for women and equality matters. It is not just about the health service providing support when women have been victims of violence, or the justice system dealing with such cases. It is not just about safe transport for women or education to prevent such violence. All the relevant Departments need to work together.
	On 25 January 2006 at column 1435 of  Hansard I questioned the then Prime Minister about that. I asked him if he would commit to developing an integrated strategy. I was somewhat disappointed by his answer, which related solely to victims of domestic violence. The point that I was making was that violence against women is much wider than just domestic violence. The Government were given one out of 10 in the first year by the coalition in its report on those services, and two out of 10 the following year. I hope that there will be continued progress.
	I hope that in her summing up the Minister will be able to report further on the issue. I raised it again on 17 July 2007 following a statement from the Minister for Women, who said:
	"We are considering merging the inter-ministerial group on domestic violence and the inter-ministerial group on sexual offences in order to take an overall view across Government on violence against women."—[ Official Report, 17 July 2007; Vol. 463, c. 183.]
	That would be welcome. I should like to know, some months on, whether that has happened or the status of the proposal.
	With reference to violence of women, I tabled early-day motion 765 on the campaign for justice for victims of rape, which 84 hon. Members have already signed. The conviction rate for rape, as we all know, is appallingly low—around 5 per cent., which is down from 33 per cent. in the 1970s. That is not the conviction rate for cases that get to court. More than four out of five cases do not get to court, so the problem is not necessarily at the jury stage. The difficulty tends to arise at an earlier stage, with cases being dropped because insufficient evidence has been collected.
	I know that the Government have been consulting on the issue, which is to be welcomed. We need to know how we can improve criminal practices to ensure that more cases get to court and are successful, but it also important that the support services receive stable funding. That can be an important factor in determining whether a woman will pursue a case, decide to drop it or not report it at all.
	We need to address the myths about rape. There have been some shocking reports about the perception out there. In 2005, an ICM poll found that a third of British people thought that in some circumstances a woman could be held partly responsible if she was raped. That must be scotched. It is not a woman's fault if she is raped. It is not her fault if she has been drinking. It is not her fault depending on what she is wearing. If somebody was murdered or mugged, we would not say that it was their fault because of the way they had acted, and we should not say that in the case of rape.
	The right hon. Member for Maidenhead mentioned a horrifying statistic about the number of young girls being pressurised into sex. A recent Amnesty study showed that 40 per cent. of young people know girls whose boyfriends have coerced or pressurised them into sex. In one sense, that is shocking, but it is not all that surprising when one considers the education that is currently provided and the different views about sex that are allowed to develop between boys and girls. We must tackle the matter from an education point of view so that it is clear what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
	I questioned the Minister for Schools and Learners about that in December. The point that I was making was that it was not just sex education that was important—relationships education must be an integral part of that. When young people are learning about how to have safe sex, about the biology of sex, about what happens, they also need to understand the context of the relationships in which that can happen and the issues of consent, love and confidence that go with that. I do not see how the two aspects can be separated, so I was extremely disappointed when I asked the Minister if he would consider making such education a statutory requirement, and he replied:
	"Sex education is statutory, but the relationship side is not."—[ Official Report, 17 December 2007; Vol. 469, c. 584.]
	He went on to say that he wanted better sex and relationships education, but would not make a commitment to make that a statutory requirement. If the Government are serious, they need to look carefully at that issue.
	On women's pensions, the Government, to give them their due, have made some progress, particularly for women with caring responsibilities who do not have a complete national insurance record. However, the way that changes are being introduced means that there will be a cliff edge where the difference in entitlement between women who are eligible after 6 April 2010 and women who are not eligible the day before will be £27,000 over their lifetime.
	The Government should have considered introducing the new scheme in a more staggered way to avoid such a cliff edge. They should also consider a citizen's pension. It will still be a requirement to have 30 years of national insurance contributions for a full pension. Even with that change from 39 years, some women will still not achieve a full pension because of their caring responsibilities. That needs to be taken into account.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) has drawn attention to the problem of women who have gaps in their contribution record, which they could pay to have filled. There was a six-year period when the Government did not inform women that that was possible. Women can do that retrospectively and in some cases be eligible for a lump sum of a couple of thousand pounds or more, plus an enhanced pension going forward. I have tried to raise awareness of the matter in my constituency and help women in individual cases, but the Government should take responsibility for being proactive and making sure that women get what is rightfully theirs.
	On the international agenda—after all, we are celebrating international women's day—it is important to consider the issues that women face around the world. There are countries where female infanticide is common. As has been mentioned, 2 million girls every year go through the appalling practice of female genital mutilation. Rape is used as a weapon of terror. We saw that in Rwanda, yet the same is happening again in Darfur. Women are oppressed in societies and countries across the world, unable to access education and denied equal rights in judicial procedures. Poverty tends to hit women the hardest. This week there is an excellent exhibition in the House, in the Upper Waiting Area, about the impact of climate change on women. In the developing world women will be hardest hit by the effects of climate change.
	Interestingly, as the right hon. Member for Maidenhead said, women can often be part of the solution, even though they suffer the worst elements of the problem. There is a high correlation between the education of women in a country and that country's level of development. We see microfinance initiatives run by women throughout the world to make their communities better, and this Government, through their international development work, should rightly ensure that the involvement of women in the solution to many of those problems is a priority.
	That brings me to women's representation, which brings all of those issues together. There are 126 women Members of Parliament at the moment—fewer than one in five—which is clearly not enough. The figures are slightly better in some of the other authorities and Parliaments. A third of the Members in the Scottish Parliament are women, but I am sad to say that that is a decrease from 40 per cent. previously. The Welsh Assembly has an excellent record, with 47 per cent. of its Members being women—I congratulate the Assembly on achieving that. In the European Parliament, 31 per cent. of Members are women. Although representation in local authorities is better than it is in this House, with 29 per cent. of councillors being women—and I am delighted that the Liberal Democrats have the highest percentage of women councillors, at 32 per cent.— we have no reason to be complacent.
	Sometimes in meetings, I have raised that problem, and men will turn round and go, "Oh, a third are women. That's quite good." And I say, "Hang on a second—it might be quite good compared to the really awful representation in other areas, but there is no way that a third of representatives being women is good." We can probably say that a figure of 47 per cent. is quite good—it is not always going to be exactly 50:50—but we cannot be complacent about a proportion such as a third. The Labour Benches are made up of many more women, and I hope that there is no complacency there, because even on their Benches, there is still a long way to go.
	We need to look at the variety of reasons why representation is so low. Is sexism the reason? It probably is partly sexism, but I do not think that it is the only one. The reason is less likely to be sexism now that it was 30 years ago. We certainly know that the electorate are no less likely to vote for a woman. In fact, I have seen research showing that not only does turnout go up when women stand, but that women are marginally more likely to be elected than men—so it is an advantage to have women candidates. If the electorate are no longer sexist, it would be slightly strange to suggest that political parties have a higher degree of sexism. Although sexism is probably still a factor in some cases, it is not the only one.
	Is it a matter of lifestyle? Is it that women look at us debating until 11 o'clock—on at least two nights so far this week—and at the sometimes strange procedures and practices of this House, and say, perhaps entirely sensibly, "Hang on a second, that's not for me. I can make an impact in another career in business or in one of the professions, or through working in my local community." I suspect that that sentiment has a role to play. However, it would not explain the low percentage of councillors. Combining the lifestyle of a councillor with the other sensible things that one might want to do is easier than combining them with the lifestyle of a Member of Parliament, which involves two lives and two homes.
	Cash is certainly part of the problem. The pay gap exacerbates the representation problem. Let us be honest about it—standing for Parliament and being involved in politics leads to additional costs. Like it or not, as the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley said, women get judged on their appearances more, so there are wardrobe costs. There are certainly child care costs. But there is also the cost of going to party conferences and accommodation, and the little things that happen all the time when one is a candidate, such as taking volunteers out for a drink after a hard day's work. A lot of incidental costs are involved, and because there is a pay gap, the financial implications are even worse for women.
	Another real problem is confidence. One of my favourite things about the job is speaking to school groups. Rather than being deferential, they will always tell it exactly like it is, and they are inquisitive and enthusiastic. I have noticed with interest that when I meet a school group and ask for questions, nine times out of 10 the first question is from one of the boys, and very often the second question is, too. There have even been occasions when I have had to turn to the class and say, "Come on girls, you must be thinking interesting things, too. Why don't you put your hands up?" And then, fair enough, some of them do. I have noticed that; I do not know whether other women, or male Members, in the Chamber have done so.
	I remember the feeling of sitting in a political meeting or a classroom and thinking of something, then thinking, "Shall I say that? No, I might look stupid." I have a sort of internal conversation, and decide that it is safer not to put my hand up, or not to contribute. Then, of course, some bloke says the same thing far less eloquently, and everyone lauds them for it. It is only through making myself speak, and through others helping me to have the confidence to do it, that I got to a position where I felt happy to stand for Parliament. I did not wake up one morning and think, "I want to be an MP"—other people suggested the idea to me.
	I did a straw poll of my female colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, and about half of them were asked to stand by someone else. I have not done a scientific poll with the male Members of Parliament, but I suggest that there might be a different result. I would urge all hon. Members who want to see more women in politics to ensure that they say to someone, "Why don't you put your name forward and do it?", rather than just expect women magically to think that they will do it. Even if they do not want to, they will be flattered to be asked.

Jo Swinson: That may well have been the case in the Labour party. I have not conducted research on the Labour party, only on my party. We found that, when shortlists were half men and half women, men won half the time and women won half the time. I will not say that there was never an instance of sexism, or that a sexist comment was never made, in Liberal Democrat selection contests, although in my experience, for everyone who said, "What would you do if you had children?" or, "Are you sure you can do this?" someone else said, "It's great to have more women in Parliament and I'll vote for you because of that." Things can even out, but I cannot speak for other parties—obviously, I do not know their internal procedures and cultures as well as those of mine.
	Each party should be entitled to find its own method of dealing with the problem. Our approach is to encourage more women to become candidates, and we have good support mechanisms to help them with that and to get selected. Given that we still have many more male than female candidates, we must ensure that those women punch above their weight and are more likely to get selected. We undertake intensive mentoring and training. Two weekends ago, we held our now annual event, "Calling all Future Women MPs!" Fifteen women attended and it was inspiring—I hope to see many of them on our Benches in future.
	Many "firsts" have happened in the past few decades. An important first was the election of the first UK female Prime Minister in 1979. I was surprised and disappointed that Labour Members could not recognise that achievement. I share many of their concerns about what Baroness Thatcher did in office—I am also speaking as a Scot, and I do not believe that she was necessarily good for the country—but I can still acknowledge that important achievement, which deserves to be recognised, as do many achievements more recently by Labour women. They include the first woman Speaker, Baroness Boothroyd, the first woman Foreign Secretary, who is still a Member of Parliament, and the first female Home Secretary. As was mentioned earlier, we now have the first female Serjeant at Arms—I was delighted when that appointment was made, and it is a shame that she is not here today.

Jo Swinson: Absolutely. The hon. Lady is quite right.
	I intend to draw my remarks to a close shortly, because there are many hon. Members present who want to make contributions and I am keen to hear them. We have made a lot of progress, but there is still so much more to do. One problem is that although we have debates and discussions about equality, I suspect that we can sometimes put women off. There is a feeling out there that this place is an old boys' club that is full of sexism and that the job is really difficult for women, but a lot of that is not true. Women Members in all parts of the House will say that being an MP is a wonderful job and very suited to the skill sets of women. It is not all about standing up and making speeches. So much of the job is about listening, dealing with constituents' problems and finding ways to work with those from different parties or other agencies in our constituencies to find solutions, and even in this place there is nothing like the sexism that there used to be. Indeed, this job is very enjoyable.
	I sometimes think that we need to make that case more strongly. In December I had an exchange with the Minister for Women and Equality in which I made that suggestion, following it up with a letter to ask whether she thought that a cross-party initiative would be a good idea. She responded in January—I should apologise for not replying yet; my time has been monopolised somewhat by the European Union (Amendment) Bill over the past month—by saying:
	"It would be good if either myself or"
	the Minister for Equality
	"could meet with you to discuss how the parties can work more effectively on this important issue."
	I very much welcome that sentiment. However, rather than having the right hon. and learned Lady or the Minister meet just me, I would hope that we could involve Conservative Members and launch a cross-party initiative looking at how, collectively, we can sell the job of being a Member of Parliament and ensure that we get the message out there and in the media that this is a very job enjoyable to do.

Richard Younger-Ross: Does my hon. Friend agree that part of the problem is the image that the House projects of what the standard MP is? The image that the media give is of a white, middle-class man who looks a bit like a stuffed suit. If my hon. Friend's grouping can persuade hon. Members to change the rules of the House, to make men look slightly less stuffed and starched, there might be a different image of what being an MP is.

Jo Swinson: I would never say that my hon. Friend looked like a stuffed suit.
	There is a lot that can be done. It would be wonderful if the message that went out from this debate was that being an MP is something that women throughout the country with talents to offer should consider and if we used the debate as a starting point to work together on the issue. We should celebrate very much all the achievements and work of women in the past, but also look forward to much better representation of women in the future.

Eleanor Laing: I do. On some occasions the realisation is more immediate than it is on others.
	I agree with much of what has been said today. For nearly 11 years I have been saying things—as have many of my colleagues, especially my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May)—and only now are we beginning to be listened to. Better late than never, though, and it is because we have the courage of our convictions that we keep going and will achieve what we set out to do.
	I want to put one thing on record. On occasions such as this Lady Thatcher is always mentioned, with great affection and respect by Conservative Members and in different terms by Labour Members—although I must say that the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) was generous in pointing out that the Thatcher Government did achieve some things for women. I will always argue that the fact that Lady Thatcher and her Government turned around the country's fortunes in the 1980s inevitably benefited the 52 per cent. of the population who are women just as much as it benefited the rest of the country.
	I have already mentioned the expansion of educational opportunities. If there is one thing that makes a difference to a girl approaching womanhood, it is having the opportunity of a good education. That is what makes it possible for a woman to compete with men who have had a good education. If we do not get education right, we can never achieve the equality that we all want. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) is shaking her head. She cannot possibly disagree with my view that education is the most important tool that can be given to anyone, male or female, to help them contribute to the society that we all want to build.
	The main thing that Margaret Thatcher did, of course, was to be there. She was Prime Minister, and therefore no one can say that a woman cannot be elected to Parliament and cannot be a successful and effective Member of Parliament.
	Last week, I was fortunate enough to be the Inter-Parliamentary Union delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York. I was sent there with the right hon. Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong), and we attended the meeting for IPU representatives. It was an important meeting, and it is a very important commission. It has been taking place for some 52 years. I felt honoured to take part, representing the UK Parliament along with the right hon. Lady. It was extremely important to be there.
	We in the United Kingdom are in a privileged and important position; I am not being complacent in saying that, as I accept that there is a lot of work yet to do for women in our country, Europe and the wider western world. However, when one attends such a UN meeting and looks around what is an enormous chamber—possibly somewhat bigger than this Chamber—filled with people, mostly women, from countries all over the world, one realises what a fortunate position we are in, because many of the battles have been won here. Some Members have already referred to the work of the suffragettes and the fact that we are celebrating 80 years of women's suffrage. Many countries throughout the world that were represented are far behind our position, as is universally known. I had an opportunity to discuss that with their representatives last week. In attending meetings such as the commission, we can make the important contribution of offering moral support and solidarity to those who still have so much to fight for in their countries.
	There were two main themes to the conference: increasing the representation of women and gender budgeting. We have discussed the first of those themes at length and I shall not reiterate the points that have already been made, but something struck me as ironic. Inside the UN building there was much talk of the importance of increasing the representation of women, and many people said—I think, sadly, somewhat naively—"If only we had more women in our Parliament, we could change this and change that, and make such a difference." Meanwhile, outside in the rest of America there are people raising money—$34 million in February alone—to pay for advertisements to try to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming President of the United States of America. If we were to follow the representation argument to its logical conclusion, merely having Hillary Clinton, a woman, as President of the USA—and, therefore, arguably the most important person in the world—would solve many of the ills of the world. I am afraid that I would argue that having Hillary Clinton as President of the USA would cause more problems than it would solve, not only for America but for its position in the rest of the world. I will not go into that in any greater detail, but it is somewhat ironic that those two major debates were going on at the same time.
	What bothers me far more, however, is the representation of women in this House of Commons. I absolutely agree with much of what the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire said about it being our duty to go out and be evangelical about encouraging other women to enter the House of Commons. Many of us in the Conservative party are doing that; we are encouraging women to stand for election, and to become involved in politics not only at local level, where we have many good women, and not just in other organisations, but here in Parliament itself.
	I hope, however, that the Minister for Women and Equality, who is also Leader of the House, will take account of the following point. If we are to encourage more women with children, and men with family responsibilities and who come from different sorts of backgrounds, to enter this House and be devoted as full-time Members, taking care of their constituency duties, their duties to this House, and their duties to their families, we must give them the financial wherewithal and the practical support to be able to balance all of those duties.

Eleanor Laing: Yes. As ever, my hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. Crèche facilities are part of it, but this is about the whole attitude towards Members of Parliament, and not only women Members. Let us be practical and honest about family responsibilities. The burden of caring for family, whether it be children, elderly relatives or someone who is sick, falls far more often on women than men. I do not like to personalise things, but I feel duty bound to use myself as an example in this case, because I am the example I know best. Two thirds of my net salary as a Member of Parliament is spent on child care costs. People say, "Can't you get grandparents to help? Where is your husband? Haven't you got a sister?". Such questions are nonsense. I am divorced from my husband. It is no wonder that he did not want to spend every weekend doing constituency duties, as I was happy to do. There was no reason why he should have wanted to go to coffee mornings every Saturday—I do not blame him.

Katy Clark: I welcome the fact that this debate is taking place in this Chamber today. On previous occasions, it has not always been possible to have the international women's day debate in the Chamber, and it is a sign of the progress that has been made and the impact that the Leader of the House has had that we are having it here today. We should all welcome that.
	I shall be brief, because several hon. Ladies wish to contribute. I do not consider it discriminatory to say that, because international women's day is about women. It is about the struggles of women and it is a celebration of women's role. We have the debate in recognition of the fact that women have faced historic and unprecedented discrimination.
	International women's day emerged from two movements. The first was the suffrage movement, which campaigned for women to have a vote and a say in how society was run. The second was made up of campaigns against the exploitation of women in the workplace. The history of international women's day shows that the two were strongly linked. The first record we can find is of New York women workers in the textile and clothing industry who demonstrated about their low wages and poor working conditions on 8 March 1857. Fifty years later, in 1907, a demonstration was held in New York to commemorate the 1857 demonstration and to call for votes for women and an end to child labour and workshops. It was the movements around May day, in support of votes for women and against exploitation of women in the work force that led to 8 March being regarded as the day on which to celebrate what women were achieving, to recognise their struggles, and to act as a focus on what women wanted to change. Many men played a significant role in many of the victories that women achieved, but on international women's day it is fitting that we celebrate the women who put so much into fighting not only for themselves but for their sisters.
	I welcome the fact that the debate is being held in the Chamber. We have discussed women's representation in the Chamber, and many Labour Members spoke of the significant advances in women's representation in the Labour party over recent years. We remember the hugely important events of 1997, when so many women were elected here. The Labour party is justly proud of the fact that in the Scottish Parliament it has always had 50 per cent. representation of women, and it is right that all parties discuss how we ensure the better representation of women. The Labour party in Scotland adopted positive discrimination, women-only shortlists and the twinning of constituencies, whereby some seats were women's seats. It recognised it had to do something—the other methods that had been tried and for which women had campaigned over so many years had not succeeded.
	I was selected on an open shortlist, but the Labour party organises itself to ensure that women enjoy parity on shortlists, and the transferable vote system encourages women who are coming through the process. It is important that we talk about that and about getting more women into this building, but it is even more important that we talk about what women must do to ensure that they have a full say over every aspect of their lives and are represented in every walk of life. That is not about women being different or the same, but about women being human beings and having a full say over the way in which they live.
	We in Britain are very lucky. We have heard much today about the problems that women still face in Britain, and I agree with what has been said about pay inequality, discrimination in the workplace and the lack of child care not only for Members of Parliament but for women throughout the country, which affects so many women's lives and their opportunities. Women play a massive role in Britain and are often at the forefront of community organisations, fighting for their communities.
	On international women's day we must celebrate what women have achieved and acknowledge that there is still a long way to go. We must also say that what we in Britain have achieved is what we expect in every country. We are all aware of the discrimination that women still experience and of the fact that they still do not play the full role in society that they should, but when we look around the world we see that we are lucky in the choices that we have. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women have so few rights and hardly any voice. They are not allowed to walk unaccompanied on the street, to drive a car or to join many professions, so it is easy to see that we in this country have come a long way.
	International women's day is about not only celebration but struggle and protest, which is how it came about and why in 1975 the United Nations decided to make it a day to be recognised throughout the world. Today, we should be saying that women should have a far stronger role in the world and a far stronger voice. If we achieve that, the benefit will be felt by not only women but humanity and the world will be more civilised.
	I hope that next year a debate on these issues will again be held in this Chamber, enabling all Members to raise their voices about why we must ensure that women secure more victories.

Fiona Mactaggart: In a way, I am disappointed that we are celebrating 90 years of women having the vote. We need to remember that, 90 years ago, women did not get the vote on an equal basis with men. A 21-year-old man could vote but the women who could vote had to be 30, property owners and so on. We must recognise that some of these celebrations of equality are about us tolerating things that are half a cup, but not the whole.
	If we look at what has happened in the 90 years since then, there have been 290 women elected to this Parliament, 186 of whom were from my party. Despite many years of Conservative government, in only eight years were there more women Conservative MPs than women Labour MPs. I do not say that to be smug; I believe it is partly because of the values of the Labour party that more women have been selected. It is also partly because we grasped the nettle of women-only shortlists, which, let me say, is a nettle in our party, too; do not think it is not.
	I would like to praise other parties; having rejected that nettle, they have had a squeeze and, as women know very well, when you cannot get in the front door, you get resourceful and find a way through the back door. It is my judgment that the training programmes for women put on by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats outshine what my party has been able to do. It is a pity that we have not done more and it is great that they have done that. We should now steal their ideas and do more.
	When I was elected, I was one of that crowd of 101 women elected to these Benches. It was a strange experience. In January 2000, I wrote a paper that said that my analysis of the problem was that because women in Parliament were the exception to the norm, every woman in Parliament carried the burden of representing women as a class of MP. Every time a woman MP made a mistake, everyone said, "They would, wouldn't they? That is what women MPs are like." One carried the burden of representing the class of women as MPs. I think that that has changed. The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) reminded us that the sexism that she faced was not as extreme as that faced by many of my colleagues when they were elected in 1997.
	We were very excited to be elected. We had that photograph, which caused us to be dubbed "Blair's babes." I have often wondered what the problem was with that. Partly, it was that we looked like pilot fish around the Prime Minister, but it was also that we never told people what electing all these women would achieve. The consequence was that every woman everywhere pinned on us, as though on a dartboard, their hopes of what a new Government could do for women. Although we have doubled child care and made massive strides on issues such as domestic violence, we have inevitably disappointed because we did not name what difference we would make.
	One of the things that I have learned from that analysis is that we should be specific about what the change in women's representation will achieve. We should acknowledge, though, that having more women in Parliament has made a difference. We have achieved changes that would not otherwise have been achieved. I think of my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Kali Mountford), who has had to leave. It was 4 am, I think, in the debate on the Education Bill when she moved an amendment on beating children. I think of the former Member for Stourbridge and her child protection work. I think of my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) who has tabled a Bill on special educational needs. All three examples focus on children, but it is not inevitable that women concentrate on children. Legislation on issues that tend to be overlooked is pushed through by women.

Fiona Mactaggart: My hon. Friend is right. I plan to end my speech by reminding Ministers that it is important to reach out—that that connection between women in the community and women in Parliament, between women in the roots of parties and women in the Chamber, is one of the sources of our strengths.
	I remember speaking, not long after we had been elected, to the Clerks of the Defence Committee. I asked whether having women on the Committee—there had been none previously—had made a difference. "Oh yes," they said. "We never used to speak about the wives and children of soldiers. We only talked about how big the bombs were. Now we focus on something that is critical, and it is now a no-brainer. We talk about it often—the fact that looking after the families of soldiers is critical to the effectiveness of our defence forces."
	There are many examples. My favourite one is the woman who generated the only ever stealth tax cut, when my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty) banged on about VAT on sanitary protection for so long that my right hon. Friend who is now the Prime Minister abolished VAT on sanitary protection in the Budget and managed not to mention it when he did it.
	Women have filled the top jobs. Baroness Thatcher has been frequently mentioned by Conservative Members. We hate her politics, but I admire her for having been the first ever woman Prime Minister. Since then we have had, in my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett), the first ever woman Foreign Secretary. My right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith) is the first woman Home Secretary, and I am betting on the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), to fill the last of the great offices of state and become the first woman Chancellor.
	We have shown that in Parliament women have made a difference, but we have missed some tricks. The Nolan Committee, which changed the way in which public appointments are made, has created a context for public appointments where, in many cases, women are disadvantaged. Let us put it brutally. The kinds of experience that women bring to the table—the experience of the school gate or of queuing at the doctor's surgery—are not valued by Monitor, the body that approves trusteeships on hospital trusts, as a result of which trustees include many very impressive business men, most of whom had private health insurance before they got on to hospital boards, but very few people who have been through the grind of waiting for health care and experiencing it in a community.
	That poses real risks. The equalities Bill creates an opportunity to do something about public appointments, not merely to ensure gender equality, but to think about the qualification for public appointment. Is it having run a big business, or is it having experienced public services first hand?
	I want to discuss briefly an issue raised by other hon. Members on which women's experience is different from that of men, which is violence. Men are more likely to be victims of violent crime than women, but the way in which women experience violence is quite different. The classic example is domestic violence, where 77 per cent. of the victims are women. On average, those victims have been assaulted 35 times before they report it to the police. Women as victims of domestic violence and of rape, and as victims of violence in other areas, face an accusation that men who are victims never face: "She asked for it." I am afraid that although things have changed, that attitude is still much too common. I am glad that John Yates pointed out, in an interview published earlier this week in  The Guardian, that the culture in the police—the failure to take early evidence and so on—is one of the contributory factors to our lack of success in securing effective levels of rape convictions.
	I strongly urge Ministers to ensure that we get an effective national reporting line for rape. I wonder whether the national telephone number that we use for NHS Direct might be a possible way of dealing with this issue. One of the problems with a local helpline is that most of us would not carry the number around in our pocket, and any woman can be raped. We need a national number that everyone knows about, through which such reporting can be done quickly, and through which women can be supported on the question of whether or not they want to go to the police. Many women are frightened of going to the police in the first place.
	As hon. Members know, I have spoken about prostitution previously, and in my usual way, I am running out of time today. I managed to raise the issue in one contribution where I was able to speak for only two minutes, and in another where I managed only 20 seconds. In my view, prostitution is another example of violence against women. Most prostituted women have been abused, and most of them are tricked into prostitution by men who groom them, get them addicted and use their power over them. A terrifying number of them have been trafficked into prostitution, and it is a very difficult thing to talk about.
	When I was a Minister and suggested that in cases where two women worked together in a flat, we should stop prosecuting either of them for brothel-keeping—a crime that carries a sentence of 14 years because it often involves so much wicked exploitation of trafficked women—I was called "Madam Minister" by the tabloid newspapers.  The Sun even sent five so-called "tarts" round to my flat in Slough, saying, "How would you like to live next door to one of these?" Now that I am arguing that we should prosecute men for demanding that women sleep with them for payment, I am called a prude.
	That is better, I suppose, than 20 years ago, when I was a campaigner in the student union against violence against women, and the student newspaper of Oxford university published a photograph of me with the caption, "Would you rape this woman?" Those attitudes have changed to some extent, but there is still a thought that rape is actually—

John Austin: I would like to comment on a couple of points raised by the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson). First, she referred to her favourite spots in touring the House, mentioning Earl Falkland's statue and the broken sword. When I take constituents around the House, my favourite part is the broom cupboard in the crypt chapel, where Emily Wilding Davison spent census night in 1911. A comment was made earlier about Emmeline Pankhurst's statue not being in the precincts of the House but outside; Emily Wilding Davison actually spent her time here, but it has never been officially acknowledged by the House. The plaque in the broom cupboard was placed there by my old friend Tony Benn, who made it himself. It is time that the House authorities acknowledged the direct action that women took to establish their right to be in this place.
	Secondly, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire referred to relationships and sex education and I think that she was absolutely right. I served on the Health Committee of the previous Parliament, which produced the report on sexual health. I think that we have got it the wrong way round when we talk about "sex and relationship education", as we should be talking about "relationship and sex education"—and the relationship education should start at the earliest possible opportunity.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) said that nothing much on the equality front was going on in this place or in government during the 1980s. At that time, my hon. Friends the Members for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) and for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) and I were actively engaged in local government. There has been some criticism of local government, and I accept what the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) said about the need for uniformity, but during the 1980s it was pioneering local authorities that pressed forward the agenda of women's rights and racial equality. We were pilloried when we set up women's equality units in our local authorities, but I am pleased to say that our work—not only in supporting and empowering women in the community, but in examining our own procedures and practices to ensure that we were not discriminating and that access was possible within authorities—has now been taken on board as mainstream, and is no longer seen as something rather loony and politically correct.
	Moreover, local authorities were in the vanguard of identifying and campaigning on domestic violence. Edinburgh, for instance, launched the first campaign for zero tolerance of domestic violence, closely followed by the Association of London Authorities, long before the Home Office had taken up the issue. Although there is some rightful criticism of local authorities' failings, I think we should pay tribute to their work in this sphere.
	I will not repeat the figures given by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and others relating to the prevalence of domestic violence, or go into the question of whether one woman in four is affected or whether the rate is higher. I will, however, repeat what my hon. Friend said about the number of occasions on which women are victims of violence before reporting it. Some, of course, do not report it at all. Domestic violence involves a higher rate of repeat victimisation than any other crime.
	It is not just in the United Kingdom that domestic violence is a problem. As some Members will know, I am a member of the Council of Europe's Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. We have launched a Europe-wide awareness campaign, which the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn)—who was here earlier—helped to launch in Madrid.
	It is estimated that in Europe overall, one in six women over the age of 16 has been in a relationship involving domestic violence. In Belgium, between April and December 2006 nearly 40,000 attacks were recorded by the courts—140 cases a day. According to Amnesty International, in Belgium 70 women die every year. In Portugal, 39 women died as a result of domestic violence in 2006. In Spain, which has some of the most advanced legislation on violence against women in the world, 71 women were killed last year. In France, one woman is beaten to death every four days. According to the United Nations, in Russia one woman is killed by her partner every 35 minutes— that is 14,000 women a year. We need to tackle the issue on a Europe-wide basis, and I am glad that the Government have supported the Europe-wide campaign.
	The majority of victims of domestic violence are women, and the majority of perpetrators are men. Statistically, is must be a fact not only that a substantial number of women in the House have been victims of domestic violence, but that a large proportion of men in the House have been perpetrators of it. The issue is important for men as well as women, because it must involve the perpetrators. I welcome the support given in this country to the white ribbon campaign, which started in north America. A conference organised by the campaign will take place next week. It will deal with the importance of engaging young men directly to challenge the stereotypes involved in violence, sexism, images and roles. Valuable work of that kind is necessary if we are to tackle domestic violence properly.
	The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) mentioned gender budgeting. Until recently I was chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Union's gender partnership working group. The hon. Lady mentioned the conference held in New York last week, which was also attended by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong). The Budget is next week, and it would be very helpful if in introducing it the Chancellor were to tell us what will be the likely gender impacts of the measures. The Government have, of course, introduced new laws. As the Budget rolls forward, Departments come forward with their policies and there is an obligation on them to produce equality impact assessments, as there also now is on local authorities. It is important that we start looking at budgets—not only at the ways they perpetuate gender inequalities, but at how they might be used to address them. I commend to Members the Inter-Parliamentary Union handbook "Parliament, the Budget and Gender".
	In this regard, one thing did happen in this House during the '80s: the Conservative Government signed the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women—CEDAW. There is an obligation on the Government to produce a report every four years to the United Nations. There is much to be commended in the 2007 report, and therefore much on which to congratulate the Government. A lot has been done during that four-year period, including the measures to tackle domestic violence, so the Government have a very good record indeed. I have a question for the Minister, however: what is the parliamentary input into that report that goes to the United Nations? I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong, but I cannot recall there having been a debate in the House about that report on our activities in compliance with CEDAW. As Members have said, we should have more frequent debates on some of the issues raised today, including prostitution. I do not necessarily agree with everything my hon. Friend the Member for Slough said about that subject, but she made some powerful points and we must have an open and honest debate about how to tackle prostitution and the exploitation of women. We should also, however, have a debate on the Government's report on CEDAW.
	I agree with the Government that for many people the best way out of poverty is to get into employment, but I get worried sometimes about women with family responsibilities being pressured into taking employment. There should be facilities, support and child care for those who wish to do so, but I do not think we should devalue those women who choose to stay at home and bring up their children and devote their time to their household; nor should we devalue what they do. We should not see that as non-productive.
	The United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women undertook some research into the productivity of such work. It is not negative; it is productive work. Some years ago I was one of the signatories to a campaign called Wages for Housework. We should get away from the idea that it is all very well for women to take a job looking after somebody else's children and getting paid for that, but it is not good for them to stay at home and look after their own children.
	My final point is on representation. The hon. Member for Epping Forest mentioned the proportion of women in various Parliaments. The IPU produces an annual report on the progress—or otherwise—that countries have made on the number of women in Parliament. Worldwide, the rate is about 17.7 per cent. but at Government ministerial level it is about 16 per cent. There are 144 nations in the league table, and the UK is about 60th, so there is clearly room for improvement. In New York last week, my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Durham talked about the UK experience, and in particular the positive action the Labour party has taken.
	I accept the point made by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) that there may be many different ways of getting women into Parliament, but I agree with the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) that the best and most proven way in a first-past-the-post system is the all-women shortlist, which the Labour party has adopted. I hope that the Minister for Equality will give an assurance that that selection process will be allowed to continue.
	I hope that we will have a debate about how we will influence the monitoring procedures that are to be set up if we do not ratify the trafficking convention soon. When I was chair of the gender partnership group, the IPU authorised a survey of Members of Parliament. A number of survey forms were completed by Members of this House, including both men and women. A report is to be published, which will discuss how men and women parliamentarians work together to advance gender equality. It will examine some of the barriers to women's participation in the political process—it will be a long report. I ask the Minister to have a word with the powers that be so that we can have a debate on it when it is published in April.

Alistair Burt: It is a pleasure to follow another thoughtful contribution. I enjoyed a number of the earlier ones, particularly those of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing). I echo a comment made by my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) to the Minister for Women and Equality. Tomorrow, when the Minister compares her contribution with the rather measured and generous spirited speeches in the rest of the debate, she might feel that she slightly let herself down at the beginning of it.
	I wish to highlight three areas where, in my experience, the role of women has been, and is, particularly significant. One is unpopular, one is very popular and a third touches on the international dimension. Hon. Members may be aware that the Yarl's Wood detention and removal centre is based in my constituency. Since the fire of 2002, that centre has been used almost exclusively for women detainees and their children. It is designed on the basis that they should be there for a brief period before being returned in most cases to their country of origin.
	Failed women asylum seekers are not necessarily at the top of everyone's care agenda, and I was pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) mentioned the issue. How a country treats those who, for one reason or another, are on the margins of society is very much a measure of its humanity. The failed asylum seekers in the Yarl's Wood centre are a mixture. Some have been convicted of crimes, notably those who have been used as drug mules for gangs, whereas others have committed no crime save for wanting to come to this country to have a better life. As the House knows well—it is the common policy of all parts of the House—that in itself is not enough reason for someone to be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom. Virtually all the women in Yarl's Wood have been through some form of judicial or other procedure that has determined that they have no right to remain here.
	Behind those legalities are issues of human tragedy. It is difficult to be certain in every case as to whether the story being told is true, but there are enough similarities in stories told to non-governmental organisations and representatives across the world to feel that some of them resonate perfectly accurately. They are stories of war, rape, oppression and escape, which are mixed in with the other stories of wanting to flee poor economic circumstances and sometimes the threat of violence from families or others.
	Once the judicial processes have been exhausted, the departure from the UK is not always a quick one. For a number of reasons, a detainee may be at Yarl's Wood for much longer than originally anticipated. They may be there for months rather than weeks—sometimes for more than 12 months. The uncertainty of the departure date considerably increases the mental anguish that these women suffer. Accordingly, my first thought in this debate is for all at Yarl's Wood, both those detained and those who care for them, for they, too, are my constituents.
	It may help the House if I make some quick points about the situation. First, I visited Yarl's Wood recently, after the change from Group 4 to Serco. My impression is that the regime is rather easier than it used to be: formerly closed doors have been opened; the ratio of officers to detainees has decreased; and detainees have much more access to each other and to all parts of the building. The atmosphere is sad, because of the circumstances, but it is not always oppressive. It is only fair that that is recognised by those who are concerned for detainees.
	Secondly, when forced removals have to be carried out, they are always filmed. That is done to protect both the officers involved and the women themselves. Occasionally stories circulate on the internet about a forced removal, which suggest unlawful or unnecessary action on the part of those carrying out that admittedly unpleasant procedure. I have asked the independent monitoring board at Yarl's Wood, which is mostly made up of constituents who are unconnected with the authorities, always to be involved if there is a dispute about a forced removal, so that it can see precisely what has happened and to act as an extra safeguard. I am grateful that the Home Office has agreed to that procedure.
	Thirdly, it is important that the Healthcare Commission has some responsibility for the medical facilities inside Yarl's Wood. We have requested that for some time, but it is still being considered. It is important because the health care provided has not always been appropriate and an extra safeguard would be helpful. Fourthly, I am still not sure that children should be at Yarl's Wood at all. I am keen that the Government and Conservative Front Benchers continue to monitor that.
	Finally, I wish to pay tribute to the befrienders, a group mostly consisting of women, who out of pure charity and kindness have made it their business to visit those who are detained and offer them what support they can while they are at Yarl's Wood. Some detainees have no one to visit them. Some have no idea about how long they will be held and some are very fearful about returning. The befrienders listen, only very rarely making an intervention in a case, because no one can be truly involved with a revolving population of some 300 or so. They provide a necessary lifeline of sanity to those in a very difficult place. All of us who make decisions about the law and through our own actions place others, after due process, behind bars and locked doors owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who visit and care for those who are thereby detained.
	On a lighter note, I wish to extend my thanks to all those women in my constituency who volunteer for some role or other and make the wheels of a largely rural constituency go round. I have had the good fortune over the past 12 months to be a member of the Commission on the Future Of Volunteering, led by Baroness Julia Neuberger, and I appreciated the opportunity to look at the work of volunteering in modern society. We can be proud of the fact that over the past 12 months some 73 per cent. of all adults have volunteered at least once and that 48 per cent. are regularly involved in volunteering at least once a month, which is a good proportion. Women outnumber men in that respect, and women are also more generous in giving to charity.
	Most of us appreciate the work done by volunteers in our constituency. I could pick out many examples, but I shall pick out solely the work of the group Carers in Bedfordshire. It has been established only for a few short years and is energetically run by Yvonne Clark. She has brought together an invaluable advice and information service for those caring for young and old throughout the county. The group goes out looking for those who might be isolated in the rural environment and lack access to facilities, and it is doing a terrific job.
	Baroness Neuberger's commission made several recommendations, which were presented to the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) in January, and I commend the document to all hon. Members. The recommendations include ensuring that volunteering is genuinely open to all and that the Government set up a working party as soon as possible to seek to remove unnecessary or disproportionate obstacles to volunteering—including, for example, repeat criminal record bureau checks, entitlement to benefit and the ever present frustrations caused by risk management and health and safety. I hope that the recommendations are considered and accepted as soon as possible.
	Last week, as my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) and the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) mentioned, the 52nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women took place at the United Nations. I commend all the UK groups that took part. The event is dedicated to gender equality and the advancement of women and takes place under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and Social Councils. Among the groups from the UK was the Conservative Women's Organisation, and I pay tribute to its chairman, Fiona Hodgson, to Pauline Lucas and to my wife, Eve, who went to New York at their own expense to represent Conservative women and take part in the various sessions.
	As we have been talking about women in politics, I wish to digress slightly and say something about those women who are in politics although they may not have been elected, and about Members' spouses, both male and female. In recent weeks, they and the work they do have come under some pressure from external sources. I am immensely proud of my wife, what she does unpaid for the Conservative party and what she does in a paid capacity for my constituents. I could not function without her and she represents many parliamentary spouses who work incredibly hard and without whom none of us would work as effectively as we do.

Alistair Burt: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who was at the commission and made a distinctive contribution, as she always does. Her comments are certainly appreciated.
	As the House has already heard, subjects such as gender financing for women through microfinance and sexual violence in conflicts were very much a theme of last week. One of the points of such a large-scale conference is what can be learned and brought back. Men's violence against women, violence and oppression in the name of honour and violence in same-sex relationships all need public recognition and to be combated virtually all the time. Women in all countries are fighting violence within relationships daily. In a recent UK survey of 18 to 24-year-olds, one in five boys stated that they saw violence as a normal part of a relationship and one in nine girls said that they would expect violence as part of a relationship; those are depressingly sad statistics.
	The event in New York highlighted how far forward Sweden, Denmark and Norway are with this agenda and how user-friendly their documentation is in comparison with ours. The action plans and documents gave sound practical advice and direction, illustrating what could be done in all countries and making a distinctive contribution to the debate that has been brought back to the UK.
	Visits overseas to developing nations have many purposes and benefits. Often, they leave visitors profoundly shocked by the different experiences for those who happen to be born and brought up in different parts of what should be one world. In many parts of the developing world, women are bearing the brunt of inequalities. Last summer, Lady Fiona Hodgson went with my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and some 40 colleagues to Rwanda for two weeks to take part in a series of projects that were put together with the co-operation of the Rwandan Government and led by my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell). The visit was inappropriately criticised at the time, and those who made such criticisms should be ashamed of themselves.
	During those two weeks, Fiona Hodgson of the Conservative Women's Organisation spent a lot of time with women from all levels of society in Rwanda. In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of a dreadful genocide, and because that genocide targeted men in particular, there are many widows, orphans and children who are heads of households. Many women lost their children, but they decided that because a new family structure was needed and because every child was special, they would adopt. Some women have adopted 18 or 20 children.
	Many people lost their homes. Previously women would never have been involved in such things as house building, but now they are. Many more women had to become breadwinners. Rwanda has the highest proportion of women in its Parliament, at some 48 per cent. In the 14 years since the genocide, the women of Rwanda have achieved their first phase of political empowerment and equality and are now working on their second vision of economic empowerment of women coupled with health provision and social welfare.
	Finally, I join the voices in this country and others who pick out the availability of water as the single most important need that the world collectively has the resources to address and that might make the single most important difference to the lives of women throughout the world. Visitors to many parts of Africa come away haunted by the spectre of so many women and children carrying huge cans of water with grace, skill and strength as they try to take the water that they need for just a few hours. More than 1.1 billion people have no access to safe water. Each year, more than 1.5 million children under five die from diarrhoea caused by dirty water. It is estimated that up 118 million people, mostly children, will die over the next 15 years from water-related diseases, all of which are preventable.
	Throughout the world, millions of people have to walk miles to find water, and they often find at the end of the journey that the water is dirty and unhygienic. Accordingly, I support the various organisations in this country that are doing what they can to raise awareness of the problem and seek change by supporting the efforts of NGOs and voluntary and charitable organisations to achieve such change.
	I particularly commend the "Turn on the Tap Challenge 2008", organised by the Christian group Samaritan's Purse. On 10 May, or thereabouts, it will be organising walks all over the country for children, schools, faith groups and others, who will symbolically walk a few miles to raise money and remember those who need to walk and carry heavy loads every day. Much of that burden falls on the women of the world, and if they were relieved of it, the time that they spend doing what takes us only a second would be freed up, and they would be freed from their frustrations. They could learn, train or be in more profitable work.
	Occasionally, constituents come to our advice centres and say angrily that we are living in third world conditions in relation to our roads, health service or transport. They have no idea what they are talking about. On international women's day, we should dedicate ourselves to freeing women from the circumstances that they have to endure all too often, about which our population fortunately knows very little.

Julie Morgan: I am pleased to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, for part of this debate on international women's day.
	I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt). I was particularly interested by his thoughtful comments on Yarl's Wood. I have been concerned about constituents who have gone there, and I share his concern about children being there. He made some important points on that.
	It is good to speak on international women's day again, when we can remember women's achievements and what happens to women throughout the world. It is important to think internationally, and I was struck by the hon. Gentleman's comments about Rwanda. The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) mentioned the exhibition in the Upper Waiting Hall. A board in the exhibition states that a study has found that in Africa,
	"on average, women carried more than 80 tonnes of fuel, water and farm water over the course of a year. That's about the same as eight steamrollers. The average for men was 10 tonnes."
	The exhibition clearly illustrates the problems that climate change is causing women and the fact that it is affecting them more than men. Today is a day to think globally.
	Here in the UK, we mark this day in many ways. It was great yesterday to be in the cross-party group that put flowers at the statue, and it was also good to be with the group of Labour women MPs who sang in the House of Commons Chapel, outside the cupboard where Emily Davison hid. My hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) mentioned that earlier.
	Last Saturday in my constituency, the women's forum put on the 1909 play "How the Vote Was Won" by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John, which was directed by our women's officer, Pam Cartlidge. It was an exciting and vibrant occasion. The author Cicely Hamilton was a remarkable woman who co-founded the women writers' suffrage league. During world war one, she worked in nursing care and then joined the Army as an auxiliary. After the war she campaigned on various issues, including birth control. She wrote the words to "The March of the Women", the rallying anthem of the Women's Social and Political Union.
	"How the Vote Was Won" was put on last Saturday to celebrate both international women's day and the 90th anniversary of women aged over 30 getting the vote, in 1918. That applied only to women who had property, so it was only one step forward. Women got the vote in 1918, but they did not necessarily get voted in, as has been said frequently in the debate. Emmeline Pankhurst said of the suffragettes:
	"We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."
	We might have expected there to be many more law-makers today, and I think that she would probably have been disappointed by the pace of change. We could have got much further, as the debate has shown. Things have improved, but the statistics have been widely cited today and we know that we still have a long way to go.
	We have discussed ways to achieve greater women's representation. In my view, we will achieve it only by taking the direct positive action that we in the Labour party have taken, with all-women shortlists and twinning in Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly constituencies. For many years, we tried all the other ways that one could think of involving training, encouragement and gender-balanced shortlists, but we got nowhere; only when we had all-women shortlists did we make a big step forward. Although the suffragettes would be disappointed, we have achieved a lot.
	As law-makers we can make a real difference, and we have done so in many areas. We have heard a lot about those today and I shall not go over all the problems such as domestic abuse and inadequate child care provision. We now have paternity pay, increased maternity pay, flexible working rights and the national minimum wage and many other measures. One of the ways in which women have made a huge difference by being part of the governing party is by changing policy on families and children. Since Labour came into office, we have taken huge steps towards creating a more family-friendly, more equal society. Views have been transformed. When I came into Parliament in 1997, it was still not the done thing to talk about such matters—I remember hearing sniggers in the House when we talked about improving child care, breastfeeding and so on. We have made a lot of progress since then. All the parties are now striving to achieve the things that we want.
	It is now much more than the norm for women to work: in Wales in 2007, 67.4 per cent. of working-age women were in employment. Between 1997 and 2007, the women's work force has increased by 12 per cent. Women now expect to be in employment, but of course they still have to look after the children and elderly relatives. The Government have tackled head-on the question of how to balance those competing priorities. The right to request flexible working has been very successful: 90 per cent. of parents of children under six who requested flexible working have been granted it. Two of my daughters have benefited from flexible working, so it has been of great benefit to my family. However, I believe that it should be extended to the parents of children of all ages. I know that the Government are considering that in their review, and I hope that we will soon hear that the right to request flexible working, which is not such a huge thing, will be extended to parents of children of all ages. Whatever age their child, parents have needs and have demands placed upon them during so-called normal working hours, and it is important to acknowledge that.
	Another important point that I hope the review will pick up is that it should be possible for parents to request flexible working on a temporary basis. Although 90 per cent. of requests are granted, that results in permanent changes to the contract of employment, whereas often parents need to change their working hours only temporarily—for example, for the year in which their child attends nursery for half a day only. That it is necessary to change the employment contract back afterwards is a matter of concern. Parents should be able to request a year's contract.
	The gender pay gap has been discussed a lot today. People who work part-time, who we know are often women, earn far less than full-time male workers in particular. Women who request flexible working—it is mainly women who do so—or who work part-time get caught in that trap.
	Another issue relating to care for children and families that I want to flag up is the informal care provided by grandparents and friends. It has been calculated that in Wales two thirds of informal care is provided by friends and grandparents. Families in some parts of Wales are totally dependent on relatives to manage and to cope. In some ways, family members are the people who are most trusted, in any case. The Government should address the issue and see whether there is any way in which the finance available for formal care can be used for informal care. Obviously, that will require some work, but we should consider the issue. Flexible working is good for families and companies, and there is much that the Government can do to improve lives for families. We can move forward by extending flexible working to the parents of children over the age of six, being more flexible about employment contracts, recognising grandparents' role, and continuing to address the pay gap.
	I have very little time left to speak. I had intended to address the issue of vulnerable women in prison, which I feel strongly about, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) went through the statistics in great detail, so it is not necessary for me to do so. All the facts show that we are not serving women, the community or children well by imprisoning women in the numbers that we do. Many more of them could be doing community sentences. I strongly urge the Government to adopt the recommendations in Baroness Corston's report, and not to leave it too long. I am concerned about parts of the Government's prison policy, and I have doubts about the two titan prisons. We should concentrate on the matter of women in prison who should not be there. I hope that the Government will move ahead on the issue.
	I should like to end, as I started, by talking about the suffragettes. The song, "The March of the Women" by Cicely Hamilton refers to suffragettes overcoming hardships through faith, daring, humour and solidarity. As the song puts it,
	"Life, strife, these two are one, Nought can ye win but by faith and daring".
	It ends with:
	"March, march, many as one. Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend."
	Women working together in the House of Commons have been able to achieve a lot for women in this country.

Stewart Hosie: I will do so. My wife, as the Minister for Public Health, can normally get home in the evening to see her daughter, even if it is late. I suspect that even women and men Members who live close to London find such a thing impossible, particularly on Monday and Tuesday evenings—or nights, or early following mornings. That matter should be reconsidered.
	In addition, the leaders of the Opposition Labour and Conservative parties in the Scottish Parliament are both women. This is my one bit of partisan politics today; while Annabel Goldie is leading the Tory group with some style and panache, I fear that Wendy Alexander is not performing to quite the same level and, sadly, has been undermined by the man who lives in 10 Downing street.
	The 2003 intake to the Scottish Parliament, approximately 38 per cent. of whom were women, was quoted by someone who has been mentioned earlier today. Hillary Clinton said:
	"We should look to you for leadership and inspiration"
	in paying tribute to the leading role of women MSPs in shaping the policy agenda within the Scottish Parliament and Scottish governance. That is vital; it cannot just be about numbers, but about what can be delivered with those numbers. I think Hillary Clinton was absolutely right.
	That 38.75 per cent. figure was recognised as the third-highest level of women's representation in legislative assemblies in the world. I understand also that the Inter-Parliamentary Union regards any Parliament with female participation above 30 per cent. as noteworthy and exceptional. The numbers I have described are good, but they show that Westminster would receive "must do better" on a report card.
	Since 1918, in every single election in Scotland to every seat, only 34 women have ever been elected and I am proud that five of them were from my very small party. Most impressive of them all was Winnie Ewing, who won the Hamilton by-election, without which there would not have been the pressure for devolution and now the Scottish Parliament. She was also elected to three legislatures: to this place twice, to Europe three times—she was appointed the first time, in 1974—and to the Scottish Parliament, where she became the Mother of the House.
	I said I wanted to talk about successes and I shall do so in relation to two successful women. The first was Muriel Gibson, who died sadly in 2005 aged 92. She rose to become a lieutenant-colonel in the Army. That was highly unusual; she was the exception that broke the rule. The second is another lieutenant-colonel, Kate Howie, who won a Perthshire council by-election two weeks ago, with 60 per cent of the vote. I was wrong when I said that I had only one bit of partisan politics; Labour got 3 per cent., which I think is worth putting on the record. She also became a lieutenant-colonel, but her achievements—rising in the military, her civilian career and her success in the election and in the council chambers—is now normal. In the modest time scale from Muriel Gibson to Kate Howie, the change is extraordinary and we should celebrate the fact that women can now succeed in any walk of life they choose. We must not be complacent, but this sort of success is normal.
	In 1967 Winnie Ewing said:
	"Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on"—
	a slogan some of us are still campaigning on. On 12 May 1999, as the Mother of the House in the Scottish Parliament, she said,
	"the Scottish Parliament, which adjourned on 25 March 1707, is hereby reconvened."
	I can think of no better measure of success than that it was someone like Winnie Ewing who reconvened that Parliament, which has delivered so much in the way of opportunity for women to engage in politics at a national level and in terms of the delivery of the kind of policies that women in particular—men as well—need to see. I hope we will all continue to push—here, in Scotland and elsewhere—not just to better the lot of women, but to better the lot of the whole of society.

Judy Mallaber: It is a particular pleasure to speak in the debate under your chairwomanship, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have fond memories of speaking when we were celebrating the struggle of the women chain makers in your constituency on the issues of low pay, a minimum wage and women's pay.
	Virginia Woolf said:
	"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman".
	That is rather a good quote. International women's day and the struggle for the franchise were intended to ensure that women were no longer anonymous or unrepresented, and that women's voice was heard and their concerns acted on. I am proud that in Derbyshire, of the 10 MPs, four are Labour women. I am pleased that in the new 11th constituency, the Conservatives have adopted a woman candidate. I am glad that they have come on board, as the woman whom they have selected has for many years complained about the barriers that she encountered in trying to be selected as a Conservative candidate. We are all familiar with those barriers. I am proud that one of our Labour women in Derbyshire was the first woman Foreign Secretary, as has been mentioned.
	I shall focus on women in work and the gender pay gap. I refer the House to the just published report from the Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee, entitled "Jobs for the Girls". It was drawn up by a Sub-Committee which I chaired with the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride) and my hon. Friends the Members for Kingswood (Roger Berry) and for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas). We know that there is still a stubborn pay gap.
	It is particularly good to discuss that issue in a debate on international women's day. As we have heard, the celebration of international women's day originated in the United States as a result of the industrial struggle in a period of huge expansion and turbulence in the industrialised world. The first march took place in the States in 1909, after 15,000 women had marched through New York City, demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. Today it is particularly relevant to talk about women at work and the struggles that we still face.
	Today we are celebrating achievement and considering the direction in which we must still go. There has been great progress. When I first became involved in promoting the interests of women, one was regarded as a lunatic feminist if one thought that balancing home and work commitments was an issue or a priority. Indeed, in the House I have been called a Stepford wife because I spoke about us promoting our policy of equal rights for part-time workers, on which we still have a long way to go. I found it odd that I was attacked for promoting the Government's policy, as it had taken about 20 years to persuade my own party to adopt it. It would have been strange for me not to support it.
	We have made progress. Now it is not regarded as mad to talk about the work-life balance; now that is almost sanctified as a policy. I was pleased that when we were drawing up our policies before the 1997 election, and our prospective Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, was being careful not to make too many uncosted financial commitments, one of the first two priorities that he identified was child care. He understood that it was not just a moral and ethical stance to promote child care, but that it was an economic issue. It is crucial that those are linked.
	That is what our Committee report has done. The work originated under the Trade and Industry Committee, and we started it partly because of the economic problems associated with the pay gap. In the press release that I put out when launching the report, I said:
	"The gender pay gap persists despite thirty years of equal pay legislation, largely due to occupational segregation."
	That gap is very stubborn and difficult to deal with, although we have made some progress. As I went on to say, the gender pay gap
	"is not only unfair to women but also limits the pool of recruits available to employers at a time when harnessing and extending the skills of all is increasingly vital for the health of the economy. To tackle this will require a culture change amongst employers, unions, in educational institutions and the whole of society."
	We need a determined battle on every front if we are to make further progress.
	One area that was referred to in our report, with which I was involved in a previous capacity when I worked for the then National Union of Public Employees, was the campaign for the minimum wage, which has been so important in starting to equalise pay for some women, and in starting to break down the pay gap, particularly at the bottom of the pay scale. In my union, that issue had been campaigned on for decades by an enlightened general secretary who made the case for county road men. It took a long time for us to recognise that it would be an important issue for women. It was a long struggle to get the labour movement to accept that we should intervene, and to get that acceptance across the spectrum. As has been said, the change was opposed vehemently in this House, and I am pleased that it is now recognised that the change was of great importance for women. I recognise, however, that there are still difficulties with regard to enforcement and so on.
	I hope that people will look at our Select Committee report, and that there will be further debate on it in Parliament. The report covers a range of issues, and I have time to tackle only a few. We looked at the implementation of the recommendations of the Women in Work Commission, set up by the Government and chaired by Baroness Prosser. It has been said that we need to look at a range of areas, not just legislation, if we are to promote equality and make further advances.
	I shall just canter through a few of the issues that we raised, some of which have been touched on. We considered the fact that one of the key factors in the gap between men and women's pay is occupational segregation: men and women going into different areas of work. It was said earlier that educating women and girls was critical. Of course that is important, and it is important internationally, but girls have been doing well in education compared with men, and there is still a pay gap. That is because of the terms under which women go into employment, the jobs that they go into and—a point made by the hon. Member for Bromsgrove—the way in which that gap persists among similarly qualified people even five years after graduation.
	If we are to break down barriers, one of the early things to consider is education. We considered two issues: work experience placements and careers advice in schools. Those should not just be an add-on for a teacher; more resources and effort need to be put into those practices. The YWCA has come up with a number of interesting ideas, including the need to try different work placements at school. I welcome our huge programme to expand apprenticeships, and I also welcome the fact that, within that, it has been recognised that we should examine the work into which boys and girls, and men and women, go.
	In one of my local schools, a girl wanted to go into construction because she wanted to follow in her father's footsteps—he was in the construction industry. She was put off by her family, who said, "No, you can't do that", even though they should have looked upon her following her father as a matter of pride. I also met a young woman in an engineering company providing signalling equipment for the railways, which was very proud of the fact that she had been taken on as a young apprentice. It adopted her—they thought that she was wonderful and hoped that she would carry on. There are good examples, and less positive ones. I hope that we can do more to promote the idea of women going into more traditional areas of work.
	There are not so many opportunities for older women to reskill if they want to go back to work. We looked at work done by Ofsted, which has examined whether courses are provided in a flexible way.
	When we asked Baroness Prosser about her key priorities she highlighted one that has been raised today: the dearth of good quality part-time work. A report last week showed how women managers, wanting to work part-time after having a baby, see their opportunities and chances for qualification plummet because they are made to take jobs at a lower level. There has been a quality part-time work initiative, and the TUC and CBI said to us that they hoped that full funding would be provided, as recommended by the commission, to promote that initiative. We have to get beyond pilots and extend those initiatives across a broader range of the economy.
	We considered legal changes because there was a feeling that the discrimination law review had not found the answers. If we continue not to make strong progress, we will have to examine again compulsory pay orders or extending the gender equality duty to the private sector.
	Apart from flexible working, public procurement is a good tool for considering ways in which to promote equality. The Olympic Delivery Authority is currently examining that. It is possible to use some of the power of public authorities over contracts and the provision of services to promote women's equality. That harks back to arguments about what local authorities did many years ago in some places with contract compliance. Further work could be done on that.
	I hope that we can examine the Select Committee report further and some of the issues that it raises. The matter is complex and requires considering all aspects of a range of subjects. We need a massive culture change if we are to make further progress. I hope that hon. Members in all political parties will commit themselves to such progress.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Several hon. Members are still hoping to catch my eye—I know that they have been waiting patiently. May I please ask for shorter speeches so that, I hope, everyone can make a contribution?

Brooks Newmark: I will do my best, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	I am delighted to contribute to today's debate to mark international women's day on Saturday. Hon. Members may know by now that I was born in the United States, but they might not know that the predecessor to international women's day was also born across the pond in February 1909. It had far more dubious parentage than mine—the Socialist party of America. Early socialist credentials stood the movement in good stead when the observance of international women's day in Russia on 8 March 1917 coincided with the downfall of the tsarist regime. However, the story of women's rights has much more to do with evolution than revolution.
	Women won the vote not because Emily Davison shocked race-goers at the Derby but because those who survived her proved themselves indispensable during the great war. If Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Davison and Millicent Fawcett were the figureheads in the fight for women's rights in the 20th century, J. S. Mill provided much of the early impetus for that fight during the 19th century.
	Mill represented Westminster as a Member of Parliament, but his constituency was far broader, and the debt that is owed to him is correspondingly deeper. Gladstone described him as the "the saint of Rationalism", and he was certainly more rational than his electorate, who failed to return him to Parliament after he had been a Member for only three years.
	It is striking that Mill's contribution to the debates of his day continues to be relevant to the debates of ours. Although we have made tremendous advances in some matters, there is clearly ground to be made up in others. When Mill spoke out on the admission of women to the electoral franchise, for example, he believed that it would address the practical grievance of the lack of property rights then given to women. He told the House simply that
	"if we were besotted enough to think these things right, there would be more excuse for us; but we know better."
	The fight for property rights for married women now seems like something out of the dark ages. However, that one moral right, which Mill explicitly identified as a justification for extending the franchise to women, had a long and painful gestation. Between 1857 and 1882, 18 married women's property Bills were introduced in Parliament and an Act finally appeared on the statute book only in 1882, by which time Mill had said goodbye to the world along with Westminster.
	The substance of the inequality is perhaps less important than the lesson that there will always be those who say that change takes time and that it must be allowed to run its course. Our answer to them should be that sometimes the pace of change needs to be given as much encouragement as possible. I am therefore proud to be co-chair of the Conservative party's Women2Win campaign with my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May). I am also proud to claim Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, as both a Conservative and a fellow Anglo-American. Women2win is making great strides to secure better representation among women, without the party needing to resort to the expedient of all-women shortlists, proving that positive action does not necessarily mean affirmative action.
	Helping to encourage the right women to be selected for winnable seats is a challenge that my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has set us. It is a challenge that we are undoubtedly meeting, with one third of the prospective candidates whom we have so far selected being women, as we heard earlier. All the women selected have shown not only what can be achieved on merit alone, but that the Conservative party is doing what it must to improve representation of women among its candidates. Notwithstanding all that, the figure of one third is only a start. I am confident that, in the spirit of 1997, things can only get better.
	I want to return briefly to another of Mill's observations during the 1867 franchise debate, in the spirit of continuity rather than anachronism. He said:
	"I should like to have a Return laid before this House of the number of women who are annually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trampled to death by their male protectors...We should then have an arithmetical estimate of the value set by a male legislature and male tribunals on the murder of a woman, often by torture continued through years, which, if there is any shame in us, would make us hang our heads."
	The issue is no longer the values set by a male legislature or a male judiciary, because we have made great advances in those respects. Nevertheless, as we heard earlier, violence against women, the practice of forced marriage, human trafficking, female genital mutilation and that most unpleasant misnomer, "honour killing", are all alive and well in 21st century Britain. Thankfully, there is no need for us to argue that those things are wrong. We all know far better than that. However, the culture may have changed in Westminster, but it has not always changed out in the real world, and that is still the challenge to us in all parts of the House.
	Added to the category of practices that are morally repugnant are those to which many people will turn a blind eye, notably inequality in pay and pensions. As the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) pointed out, the median pay gap between male and female full-time workers fell from 17.4 per cent. in 1997 to 12.6 per cent. in 2007, while the mean figure fell from 20.7 to 17.2 per cent. in the same period. In the words of the women and equality unit, the median gap between male and female part-time workers has "remained fairly static," at around 40 per cent. Although there has been some progress, clearly we can all do better. Some 28,000 sexual discrimination cases were taken to employment tribunals last year, which is double the figure of the previous year. Since I am an optimist, I interpret that as evidence of a greater awareness among women of their rights, rather than of a greater incidence of discrimination, but the figures should nevertheless give us pause.
	I want to conclude with some final "grist to the Mill" from 1867, by noting his warning that
	"men are afraid of manly women; but those who have considered the nature and power of social influences well know, that unless there are manly women, there will not much longer be manly men."—[ Official Report, 20 May 1867; Vol. 187, c. 822-828.]
	One woman has, of course, proved him utterly correct. I doubt that my noble Friend Baroness Thatcher would have enjoyed being called "manly" but she certainly revelled in her Soviet sobriquet as the Iron Lady and showed her formidable strength over many years. As a member of Mr. Speaker's advisory panel on works of art, I know how delighted hon. Members in all parts of the House are that the Iron Lady was recast in bronze by Antony Dufort and placed in the Members Lobby just over a year ago.
	Lady Thatcher was a towering figure in British politics and it is more than fitting that her statue should be larger than life. As the United States focuses its electoral debate on the merits of two very different Democratic presidential candidates, let us all be proud in this country of the distance that we have already travelled and of our shared commitment to continuing that journey.

Ann Cryer: I have cut my speech down a great deal, and I shall start very near the end.
	Since February 1999, there has been a campaign for changes to the customs and practices of some of our ethnic communities, in order to improve the lot of young women born here or brought in from the sub-continent as a spouse. My friend, Alice Mahon, then the MP for Halifax, and I had an Adjournment debate on the subject of forced marriages. We did so not because we woke up one morning and searched around for an Adjournment debate topic, but because we were becoming aware of, and alarmed by, the increasing number of young ladies of Asian descent coming to us for help. They usually wanted us to ask a high commission, often the one in Islamabad, to put a stop on the provision of an entry clearance visa for their so-called husband.
	In the past nine years, things have moved on enormously. Forced marriage is no longer a taboo subject, and police forces such as that in West Yorkshire have developed excellent practices for helping victims. I should like to mention Philip Balmforth, who is employed jointly by the West Yorkshire police authority and Bradford social services. He must now be a world authority on rescuing victims and ensuring their safety. The consular section of the Islamabad high commission, with the help of the local Pakistani police, has developed some very good methods for rescuing victims and getting them to safety. The forced marriage unit here in London, funded jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office, is doing sterling work in giving advice. The Home Affairs Committee is looking into how further improvements can be made.
	However, all our work is with victims and potential victims. The ideas that I started off with, of winning the hearts and minds of community and religious leaders—and, though them, those of the families and wider biradaris—have not reached anything like fruition. Communities are still in denial, and those practices continue apace. I therefore hope and trust that the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007, which comes into force in September, and the changes to immigration regulations that are now out for consultation, will eventually stop these mediaeval practices, or at least reduce their numbers.
	On a vaguely related subject—again, I am treading on eggshells—I will continue to encourage primary care trusts to advise communities to move away from the practice of cousin marriages. Yes, many children born to such marriages are perfectly healthy, and some children born to parents who are not related suffer from birth defects. However, Bradford has the second highest number of infant deaths in England. A study by the paediatrics department at Bradford royal infirmary, led by Dr. Peter Corry, has so far identified 148 different autosomal recessive genetic conditions in child patients over recent years. Dr. Corry estimates that a typical British health district might see between 20 and 30 such conditions. There is a growing recognition of such problems by the younger generation, but that is not the case with older people and those brought in from the sub-continent for marriage. The Bradford and Airedale Teaching Primary Care Trust should be supporting a younger, enlightened generation by encouraging community elders, and parents arranging marriages, to move away from cousin marriages.
	I wanted to mention the Church of England, and the fact that 50 per cent. of its vicars are women. I look forward to seeing women bishops, and I have spoken at one or two meetings about that. However, I shall have to give up now, as someone else wants to speak.

Peter Bottomley: I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer), for her perceptiveness, persistence and courage and for the clever way in which she raises important issues. She is respected not only in the country but in the House.
	There are more widows in India than there are females in this country. There are between 33 million and 35 million widows there, many of whom are very poor. I want to pay tribute to Raj Loomba who, in memory of his mother, Shrimati Pushpa Wati Loomba, created a foundation with the initial aim of helping the children of 100 widows in each of the 29 Indian states. The foundation was founded 10 years ago, and I pay tribute to its success in exceeding its targets. I should also like to say how much I enjoyed listening to a speech by its patron, Cherie Blair, who spoke at a lunch for the Three Faiths Forum at the House of Lords this afternoon. Such achievements give us an indication of what can be done for people facing far greater challenges than those that we face in this country.
	In this country, there is absolutely no doubt that the position of women is getting better, but it is still wrong. Part-time working women earn less than part-time working men. There is the paradox, of course, that while part-time working women in manual jobs earn less than men and part-time working women in white-collar jobs earn less than men, if we take part-time working women as a whole, they earn more per hour than men. That is because more of them are in white-collar jobs, which means they are more qualified, and also because working-class jobs were traditionally for men.
	That will change, and I hope we will see changes in the sort of things I observed when I first became a Member of Parliament. When I was an MP representing a south-east London constituency, I visited a girls' school—a dame's school, meaning that the headmistress had become a dame, but she had actually left—and found that not a single school leaver from this school of 1,200 girls had an A-level in maths, physics or chemistry. We cannot claim that we are providing opportunity for all in comprehensive schools if children get no A-levels in maths, physics or chemistry. I am not saying that they are not capable of doing it, but those who are capable—there should be a spread of them in schools—should be able to do it. It is often a want of ambition, a want of expectation or a want of something—whatever it is, it needs changing.
	When I went to a secondary school in Westminster and asked when a pupil last got an A grade in mathematics, the school did not know. I hope that that sort of thing is changing. I will do all I can to support the achievement of good results in the so-called hard subjects—in fact, I think maths, physics and other such subjects are easier, because there are right and wrong answers. We will make a change and raise expectations so that more people can go into the professions and educational lines of work—qualifications matter.
	It is odd to think back to when I was a junior Minister in the Department of Employment. I discovered—or rather, I was told, as I did not discover it myself—that 80 per cent. of our first-line managers were female, and within two promotion grades 60 per cent. were male. Part of that was due to the fact that one had to apply for promotion rather than be given it; and part of it was a conspiracy between the management and the unions that one could not get a second promotion until a certain number of years had passed. Many women were mothers, but the fact that many male workers were fathers did not seem to matter, as they did not take time off work.
	In some ways, we expect women to take on the responsibilities and opportunities of their fathers while maintaining the responsibilities of their mothers. We should stop saying that women who are not in paid employment are not working. I have not yet met a woman with family responsibilities who was not working—or probably not doing even more work than most of their men would willingly put up with for long. They certainly carry the burden of looking after many of the older generation who need help.
	Incidentally, may I say in passing that to regard our present parliamentary hours, particularly when we start early, as "family friendly" is absolute nonsense? One cannot take a child to primary school if one needs to be at work at 9 o'clock in the morning and one cannot look after an elderly parent during the day if one has to be here. In fact, the older hours were far more compatible with family responsibilities than the present ones, but that is a side issue.
	There is not enough time to go into a number of other issues that I would have liked to cover at some length. I believe that those who make appointments should always ask themselves who are the women who can be considered on merit as well as who are the men who come naturally to mind.
	Let me provide another anecdote. When I was appointing a street works advisory committee to look into services under the roads—telephone, computer, electricity, gas and the like—11 names were put forward. I asked those who provided the advice to come and have a chat as I had noticed that all 11 were male. They said that that was due to chance. I asked what categories were being filled. They said they wanted to have someone who had been head of transportation for a major highway authority. When I said that a woman retiring from the Greater London council would also qualify, they said that they had forgotten about her. When I suggested a professor of electronics or engineering, they said, "Name one", so I named one from the university of Surrey. I said that I did not know all the universities around the country. It was suggested that we met again a week or so later. We came back with 11 names and appointed all 11: six were women and no one raised an eyebrow, because they were all clearly qualified to fill the categories for which advice was sought. Those sorts of things matter.
	Let me end, if I may, by paying tribute to my wife, who was one of those women who had not really thought of coming to the House of Commons. She once thought that the only time she would come here would be if I got run over by a bus and she would be the grieving widow, gently smiling and dabbing her eyes. In fact, she was approached and told that she was on most people's lists. She would not have come here if the suggestion had not been made to her. I think that just as we suggest to people that they should consider becoming nurses, doctors or teachers, or becoming involved in some enterprise, we ought to encourage more talented people to stand for election. We know that women can perform their roles in the Cabinet, as Members of Parliament and as councillors, and I think we should try to ensure that we do not just wait for the volunteers.
	I will end my speech there, because I know that the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd) wants to speak as well.

Tony Lloyd: I am grateful to the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) for his courtesy.
	Let me explain, in the few minutes available to me, why I consider this day important. Various Members have pointed out that it is the 90th anniversary of the first votes for women. On that occasion my grandmother did not get the vote, because she had no property. She had three children and no husband, and she lost her job because men were returning from the first world war and she was told that she was doing men's work, so perhaps that 90th anniversary is not such a great symbol after all.
	If we want a real symbol of the change in attitudes we should think of 1997, when the culture of the House of Commons changed radically and inevitably. Those of us who were here before 1997 will know how much it changed. I do not mean just the way which we dealt with each other outside the Chamber. Anyone who glances at a 15-year-old Order Paper will observe a very different set of priorities and preoccupations, and that is a result of the arrival of so many female Members. Most of them are on the Labour Benches—my sisters—but I think that attitudes have changed in all parts of the House, and for the better.
	When we take stock of what this Government have done, we see that there have been tremendous achievements. I do not have time to list them all. Instead, I shall mention an area in which we need to make more progress: equal pay. While I agree that we will need the pay audits that were mentioned earlier if we are to see the pay revolution that we want, we should also recognise that many women's roles as carers or mothers mean that their careers do not operate on the same basis as men's. That is at least part of the reason for the fact that the pay gap is still so wide.
	Probably more than half the work force have worked flexibly in the past 12 months, but some of that flexibility may not be good for employees' families. Perhaps we need a different kind of flexibility. We should ask what flexibility really means in our society, and we should extend the concept of how we offer it to members of the work force. As Members in all parts of the House have pointed out, because of the type of career that women pursue they often undersell themselves in the labour market relative to their qualifications, and as a result drift into less secure occupations. Very different patterns of employment now exist. Women are often temporary and agency workers—there is a continuing debate about that—and the fact that they occupy such positions makes them more vulnerable. It leads to a continuing cycle of low pay, which will also affect women's pensions at the end of their working lives.
	As this is international women's day, let me say something about the international situation. Two thirds of the 1.3 billion people living in desperate poverty on the planet are women, as are some three quarters of the nearly 900 million who are functionally illiterate. The hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) said that the need for water was one of the great needs of our planet, but education is another. The task of liberating a generation of women globally through the power of education is a challenge that is enormous but achievable. I am proud of the Government's record on international development, and the specific investment in education programmes. Such measures are fundamentally important if we are to change the way in which the world operates.
	We have heard much about people-trafficking and, in particular, about women—literally millions of them—being forced into prostitution. I urge the Minister to ensure that Britain ratifies the European convention on trafficking, and that the International Labour Organisation is given real teeth. That has not been a fashionable organisation with all Governments, but it is vital in terms of people trafficking. More effort through international organisations, and particularly the ILO, could make a genuine difference to the blighted lives of millions of people on this planet.

Shailesh Vara: There was one exception: the hon. Lady. It is, however, regrettable that no other Labour Members could bring themselves to pay tribute to a woman who fought through a male-dominated society to become not only leader of her party, but also Prime Minister.

Derek Twigg: I thank the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon) for his kind comments at the beginning of his speech. He has always been courteous in his dealings with me and assiduous in pursuing his constituents' interests. We have met about various issues on a number of occasions, and I am sure that we will meet on others. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate on the review of security at RAF Welford. I know that he has already raised the matter personally with the Secretary of State for Defence, and I am happy to confirm the assurance that he has already been given in the House today.
	RAF Welford is made available to the United States visiting force under the NATO status of forces agreement of 1951 and other arrangements, which are appropriate to the relationship between the UK and the US for the purpose of our common defence. The United States visiting force is present in the UK at the invitation of the UK Government, and demonstrates the special relationship that exists between our two Governments.
	Although considerably reduced since the end of the cold war, the USVF forms an important part of the continuing US commitment to NATO and the security of this country. That importance is much more than just symbolic; direct support is provided to NATO forces and coalition forces—including, of course, UK forces.
	The UK welcomes that commitment and the contribution that the US forces provide to NATO, which remains the cornerstone of Europe's security policy and the only organisation guaranteeing its members' collective defence. Under the 1951 agreement, the Secretary of State for Defence retains legal possession and control over all sites made available to the USVF, including RAF Welford. The sites continue to be known as RAF stations for the simple reason that they are RAF stations playing host to units from the US armed forces stationed in this country.
	The USVF units remain responsible for administering their own routine, day-to-day activities. They use the RAF stations on licence technically as a matter of comity between sovereign powers and rather than as a matter of landlord and tenant. But article 2 of the NATO status of forces agreement is clear in its statement that:
	"It is the duty of a [visiting] force and its civilian component and the members thereof as well as their dependents to respect the law of the receiving State."
	We play host to a significant population of US service personnel, their civilian support personnel and their families. There are currently approximately 12,000 members of the USVF stationed at the 10 USVF bases in the United Kingdom, making a valuable contribution to our collective defence. In addition, there are a similar number of dependants, making a total USVF plus dependants of some 24,000. We should not forget that we have a responsibility to provide those personnel with a safe and secure environment and to support the important work they do, so that it is not disrupted or undermined.
	As the hon. Gentleman has highlighted by initiating this debate, any armed forces establishment is likely to contain dangerous materials. This is certainly true of RAF Welford. In those circumstances, safety is paramount, and any unauthorised incursions into military establishments may present a risk. The various warning signs around the base are there for the safety of the public as well as for the security of the base. Of course signs are not enough and it may be of value if I outline to the House the arrangements in place for the security of USVF bases.
	The degree of protection at Ministry of Defence establishments and sites used by the USVF will vary from site to site according to the location, the nature of the establishment and the risk to the site. Security measures are informed by threat assessments, which are derived from available intelligence. That involves risk management decisions, taking into account the effectiveness and proportionality of countermeasures.
	It is the UK's responsibility as the host nation to provide and fund the appropriate level of external security to RAF bases made available to the USVF in the same way as support would be provided to any MOD establishment with a similar role. In addition, the host nation will take into account legal and policy restrictions placed on the USVF and acknowledged sensitivities and concerns associated with conducting global operations while based in an overseas environment.
	There are several options that may be considered for the protection of defence establishments. The first is unarmed guarding, the core of which is provided by the MOD guard service and comprises access control measures that can include personnel and vehicle searches and patrolling, where an unarmed guard provides a limited visual deterrent but may be limited in his or her ability to respond to an incident.
	The second option is defensive armed security. An armed guard at the entrance to a military establishment provides an important visual deterrent. An armed guard is also better placed to respond in the event of a terrorist incident if a suspect is armed, and is able to react quickly to an incident. Armed guarding at UK armed forces locations is provided by UK service personnel from the unit stationed at those locations or by the Military Provost Guard Service, a specialist unit designed for that purpose. Beyond that, however, the MOD has the option of deploying the MOD police to any location owned or run by the MOD. They bring with them the full range of constabulary powers.
	In addition, police officers possess the skills to interact with personnel and the general public with a view to gathering intelligence, maintaining the peace, detecting and preventing crime and prosecuting offenders. With the agreement of the local police force they can work both inside and outside establishments. There are currently close to 4,000 personnel serving in the MOD guard service, around 2,000 personnel in the Military Provost Guard Service and some 3,500 MOD police officers. They work at more than 200 locations across the country. May I take this opportunity to make clear my appreciation, and I am sure that of all hon. Members, for the work they do in maintaining the safety and security of the armed forces and the public?
	When it comes to the USVF sites, there are some variations in this pattern. The status of forces agreement places a responsibility on the visiting forces to maintain internal security at any location provided for them. That duty is also fair and reasonable. We would not invite forces to this country who did not recognise or understand such a duty. Those responsibilities and duties are fully recognised by the USVF. It maintains a security force that has jurisdiction over US service personnel and which can provide both armed and unarmed guards for these locations. The security force does not, however, have constabulary powers. For that they must draw on either the local police force or the MOD police. Discussions are taking place with the USVF on future arrangements as part of a wider review of security at its bases, including RAF Welford. It is too early to predict the outcome, as the hon. Gentleman will understand, having made a number of important points about that.
	I assure the hon. Gentleman that the MOD continues to strive to adapt and improve the security measures already in place so that they meet the evolving threat, with priority given to the protection of life and those assets critical to the delivery of our defence capability. Our security policy and standards must be proportionate to the threat, effective, consistent and cost-effective. In attempting to gain efficient and cost- effective security, it is important to ensure that appropriate physical security measures are in place and to identify the right balance and number of personnel required to perform the task.
	In closing, I should like to assure the hon. Gentleman that the security arrangements at all bases, including RAF Welford, remain an important priority to both the MOD and the USVF. I further assure him that any changes that take place will occur only if they are suitable and appropriate and do not compromise the overall level of security.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at twenty-six minutes past Six o'clock.